


For Lack of Better Options

by leftofrevolution



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Humor, M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-07
Updated: 2019-02-07
Packaged: 2019-10-23 21:23:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17691314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leftofrevolution/pseuds/leftofrevolution
Summary: "How did you find me?"And now Kylo Ren was haunting his dreams with stupid questions, apparently. "The bond between our souls guided me towards your pulsating darkness of your pain.""... No it didn't.""No, it didn't," Hux agreed, and considered opening his eyes before deciding the conversation wasn't worth it. "I used the tracker in your belt."





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So I wrote four bits of a Hux/Ren fic right after The Force Awakens came out and then realized I was never going to finish it. Some of it is sort of amusing, so here it is.

The only real downside to Hux's promotion to general was that it didn't leave him a lot of people to have sex with. Now that he had the benefit of three months of hindsight, that downside was beginning to seem more insurmountable than he'd originally supposed. There had usually been around twenty colonels at any given time assigned during his tour on the _Implacable_ , scattered among the stormtrooper corps, starfighter corps, armored transport command, special forces, support, engineering, investigation, medical, and strategos. When one included the several thousand members of the Navy that crewed an _Imperial_ -class Star Destroyer who weren't in the Army's chain of command at all, he had in retrospect been quite spoiled for choice. It was true he had been the youngest colonel on board the ship, but it hadn't been by enough to engender him any ill-will, and it hadn’t taken long before Colonel Hapikk of the _Implacable's_ armored transport division decided she was more than happy to take him first under her wing and then into her bed. It had been a thoroughly enjoyable arrangement, but it had been mutually understood that even if his promotion to general hadn't transferred him to another posting, there was no way they could have continued on. They parted with cheers in the officers' lounge and went their separate ways without a second thought from either of them.

It was not a surprise to be promoted, nor to be given the Starkiller Project. He knew there was no one else who could take the lead on the base’s construction, and no mere colonel could command a base of that size.

To also be granted command of a Star Destroyer, however, much less the _Finalizer_ , was... confusing. An honor, he would tell anyone who asked, but not one he had expected, and that made him wary.

The _Finalizer_ was the first of the new _Insurgent_ -class of Star Destroyers, twice the size and number of crew of an _Imperial_ class. Generals were Army; they were not, as a rule, placed in charge of capital ships. Generals had bases, or command of all soldiers within a given division on a Star Destroyer or a series of Star Destroyers within the same fleet. Even starfighter corps generals commanded starfighter wings only, not the larger ships. By all rights the _Finalizer_ should have been the flagship of the Navy, commanded by High Admiral Khartosh and surrounded at all times by an escort of no less than half-a-dozen _Imperial_ -class Star Destroyers, instead of operating as an independent vessel informally attached to the Starkiller Project. It was a privilege and an honor to be even assigned to the ship, much less placed in charge of it, and Hux spent the first week of his new command wondering why the First Order's newest general had been granted such favor, even with the understanding that command would be shared with Supreme Leader Snoke's apprentice.

Perhaps that was why they had chosen him. High Admiral Khartosh would have been insulted to have to share the command with Snoke's apprentice, but Hux had Starkiller. If he was to be a glorified adviser to Kylo Ren, so be it; he had more important things to worry about.

The problem was that Ren seemed to feel the same. He didn't assert command of the _Finalizer_ ; he hardly seemed to recognize his power at all, beyond knowing that no one had any over him. He spent all of his time in his quarters, or off on solitary missions for Supreme Leader Snoke that didn't necessitate the _Finalizer's_ involvement, or off doing something else he wouldn't elaborate upon and Hux lacked the authority to ask about. Hux didn't even notice at first; he was too busy getting SK-003's terraforming started. Which meant there was an awkward period of time where Captain Jadala was effectively in sole command of the _Finalizer_ but had absolutely nothing to do but guard SK-003, which was important but unnecessary, considering how many levels of secrecy were layered around the project. Once someone was assigned to Starkiller, the only way they were to leave until the project was completed was upon the _Finalizer_ , and the only place _Finalizer_ crew were granted shore leave was upon SK-003. If the _Finalizer_ went to other planets, it was on missions. But there were no missions. So it took about a month before Hux received a holomessage from Captain Jadala begging for something to do.

Hux had all but forgotten about the _Finalizer_. It had been, in his mind, Kylo Ren's problem. Except some questioning of Jadala made it clear that he had, in fact, had it the wrong way around, and Kylo Ren was the _Finalizer's_ problem. Ren wouldn't give orders except to tell people to get out of his way, and upon returning from one of his latest missions, he had commandeered a conference room for three hours only for the next occupants to find all the furniture inside torn to pieces. The members of the stormtrooper's maintenance squad were thus the only ones who Ren had given anything to do, and they would just as soon not. Apparently Lord Ren was strangely effective at glaring even through his helmet and had destroyed the first maintenance droid that had come onto the scene.

It had been two months by that point since Hux had last had sex, which was his longest dry spell ever since the Academy. Twice the crew of an _Imperial_ -class Star Destroyer or no, everyone on the _Finalizer_ was under Hux's command. This was also true of the staff assigned to the Starkiller Project, of whom there were nearly a million, so Hux was constantly surrounded by people who he couldn't have sex with. He was, therefore, somewhat snappy with Captain Jadala complaining about being bored. At least the captain could descend to SK-003 and ask literally anyone she came across if they wanted to have a drink; SK-003 was inhabited solely by Army and a smattering of starfighter corps, and Captain Jadala wasn't even within Starkiller's chain of command. He was on the verge of giving the captain the mission of finding him a prostitute when he finally came to his senses and realized how far he had sunk; this was no way for a general of the First Order to behave.

But he couldn't even find his own prostitute, since there was no shore leave off of SK-003 until the project was completed. No admirals or other generals were due to visit SK-003 in that time. The projected completion time of Starkiller Base was still well over a year out. That meant he was looking forward to nearly a year and a half of having no one to share his bed.

When he had first proposed the Starkiller Project to High Command, perhaps he hadn't planned out its execution as well as he had thought.

He really shouldn't be taking this out on the crew of the _Finalizer_. They hadn't asked for this either. He couldn't attach the ship to an admiral until the project was over, but that didn't mean they had to spend the next year in orbit around SK-003. Ren was Snoke's apprentice; there had to be something that needed doing in the galaxy.

\--*--

Hux had exchanged words with Kylo Ren a total of twice since their shared command began, which was also the first time he had met him. The first time had been what would have been a simple introduction had Supreme Leader Snoke not been the one to make it, being brought into the holoprojector room on the _Finalizer_ the day of Hux's arrival and being stared down at by a ten-meter tall projection of the leader of the First Order. Hux had mostly concentrated on standing in as close as he could get to perfect parade rest, the overall effect slightly ruined by his chin jutting slightly upwards in a fashion that felt insubordinate but was necessary in order for him to be even able to look up high enough to see Snoke's face.

Ren had arrived before him, both upon the _Finalizer_ and within the holoprojector room. He had heard of Kylo Ren before, of course; the man had appeared on the scene over a decade previously while Hux was still in the Academy, announced simultaneously as the new Master of the Knights of Ren and Snoke's apprentice (whatever that consisted of). Apparently he had massacred Luke Skywalker's burgeoning Jedi school to gain his place, but beyond that the rumors grew more vague. Some said he had been a student at that same school. Some said he had killed the previous Master of the Knights of Ren, though whether that was a requirement to lead them was even less clear. Hux hoped not. As individual strike operatives answering only to their master (and Snoke by extension), they were irritating but effective, and when you had a knight order that numbered less than ten at any given time (for whatever reason), having to kill one to advance seemed like an awful waste of resources.

Not that Ren didn't seem perfectly capable of killing his predecessor. Or anyone who happened to be standing in an inconvenient doorway. He was standing completely still upon Hux's arrival, but even through the layers of robes and the mask, Hux could see the tense line of his shoulders and the minute vibrations of his hands. He was possibly the least relaxed person Hux had ever seen out of an active combat situation. People who stood like that normally without obvious external stimulus were the ones quietly scooted off for psychological reconditioning before they snapped and murdered somebody.

Glancing at Ren out of the corner of his eye periodically, Hux didn't really think that was a viable option here. Even ignoring the magic powers and the laser sword, Ren was enormous, as tall as Phasma and even wider in the shoulders, for all he was hunching them in at the moment. Difficult to drag someone like that off. And, as Snoke immediately informed both of them, they shared command of the _Finalizer_. Hux couldn't make Ren do anything.

But Ren also couldn't make Hux do anything. Which should have been reassuring for someone whose hands twitched like that, except Hux had no idea how shared command actually worked. It seemed like a deadlock waiting to happen, which was just a disaster waiting to happen considering they were discussing command of a capital warship.

He had eventually decided to act as if Ren had standing command of the _Finalizer_ —Hux was in charge of construction of a base with personnel currently numbering nearly a million, he could afford to be magnanimous about this if it simplified the whole process—except that Ren had apparently made the opposite decision independently of Hux and had abandoned his command of the _Finalizer_ entirely. Which would have been fine if Captain Jadala was authorized to leave the orbit of Starkiller Base without either of them, but she wasn't.

So in the end, the First Order's newest general and the Supreme Leader's apprentice had been granted command of the newest, grandest ship in the fleet for reasons that were entirely unclear, and neither of them wanted it nor were suited for it. So it languished in orbit until Captain Jadala made her plea to Hux, which was when he decided a meeting with Ren was in order.

Beyond their initial appearance together in front of Snoke, they had exchanged curt greetings once when passing each other in a hallway on Starkiller Base, so total words actually exchanged between them currently numbered less than ten. This was, in retrospect, a total dereliction of duty on both their parts considering they had shared command of the _Finalizer_ for three months, and it was time Hux took steps to rectify that.


	2. Chapter 2

"You should really consider accepting that promotion," Hux told Captain Phasma about halfway through his third glass of lum. Captain Phasma, who was in reality Colonel Phasma, who by dint of being in command of the entirety of the First Order's stormtrooper corps really should have been General Phasma, but Phasma had been General Orlov's protégé for so long that after Orlov's retirement, none of High Command had anyone with whom threatening Phasma with replacement would be a credible bluff. She had therefore spent the past year in a strange liminal area where she had been given her command posting but not accepted the commensurate rank, and High Command was making its displeasure known by semi-exiling her to Starkiller Base until its construction was completed.

Sitting across from him with her own glass of retsa, her semi-exile didn't seem to be bothering her as much as his own assignment was bothering Hux, which was funny in a sad way when he remembered that he had asked for this posting and she had not. She just gave him a wry grin and threw back her glass before gesturing to the serving droid for another. "I won't give High Command the satisfaction of thinking they wore me down."

"You just want to continue carrying on with that idiot Dwarmiz in command of Bronze Wing," Hux muttered sullenly into his glass.

Phasma, nearly two meters of blonde muscle and sharp lines with a few scars Hux hadn't cared much about several months ago but was beginning to find increasingly intriguing, stared at him evenly with only a twitch at the corner of her mouth to betray her amusement. "You realize that even if I was willing to fuck you, as soon as I accepted a promotion I'd be reassigned back to one of the Core Worlds. Your bed would be just as empty as it is now, except then you wouldn't have anyone to bitch to about it."

It took a depressing amount of effort to prevent himself from laying his head down on the table. They were in the most newly constructed officer's lounge of Starkiller Base a few hours into the third shift, which had just been completed and thus was not yet fully discovered, but there were still other people milling around. They might not be able to overhear this conversation, but they'd certainly notice if he visibly gave into despair. Not a good look on the commander of a base whose construction was already controversial. "Trust me, after a few months of being surrounded solely by fraternization risks, your standards would stop insisting on only having sex with people who could match your bench press and also start hovering somewhere around 'bipedal and not visibly decrepit.'"

"A man fulfilling one of his lifelong ambitions has no right to sound so depressed." But despite her words, Phasma did sound a little sympathetic. "At least you know there is a time limit. Starkiller is proceeding on schedule."

"Not as comforting as you would think." He contemplated his lum for a long moment. "Captain, you've served under a number of the generals and admirals of the First Order. How did they handle this situation?"

Phasma's mouth thinned. "You believe I would have wasted my time contemplating the sex lives of my superior officers?"

Hux stared at her. "Has Starkiller's stormtrooper division not gotten their betting pool already set up?"

Phasma's mouth twitched again. "... They just finished collecting everyone's wagers last week. Most people guessed asexual for you, by the way. But," and she took a sip of her new glass of retsa while Hux waited impatiently, "Since you just won me some leave time, I'll share with you the accumulated wisdom of the stormtrooper corps in exchange for what I'm about to say never leaving this table."

After Hux nodded with appropriate solemnity--it was no small thing for the gossip of one division to be transferred over to another--Phasma thought for a long moment. "Alright. So."

\--*--

General Nariya was involved with the governor of the planet upon which her base was located. Admiral Zsinj was widely assumed to be fucking his chief intelligence officer, but as no one was entirely sure who that was (the admiral was known to have one of the better intelligence networks), not even High Command was certain whether he could be charged for violation of fraternization regulations. Admirals Bromin, Wardwik, and Pequof were all assigned to the same sector and had in-person conferences far more often than was actually necessary to coordinate the sector's defense, which had generated an 'in bed' meme so widespread that Hux had heard it despite having neither met nor served under any of them. General Fel had married a civilian actress and just brought her along on all of his deployments. Admiral Idriv actually was asexual. No one wanted to know what High Command was doing, and their red guards were outside the stormtrooper gossip network anyway. Admiral Thrawn had been out pacifying the Unknown Regions for so long that Phasma wasn't even certain he was still alive, but while people used to joke about his close 'friendship' with his second-in-command, it had been impossible for those who had actually served under him to not notice how much time he spent visiting with the most famous artists of whatever planet he had most recently saved from pirates. "The only fleet in the First Order where every officer's lounge doubled as an art gallery," Phasma sighed wistfully; her first tour of duty had been with Thrawn. "And you would not believe the personalized signatures on the backs of some of them."

Phasma was, as expected, a font of knowledge, but as Hux didn't want to skirt violation of fraternization regs, nor were there any civilians around, subject to his authority or no, there wasn't a lot which could help him.


	3. Chapter 3

Ren had been dumped unceremoniously into the cruiser's tiny medical bay. The stormtrooper contingent Hux had ordered to go out with him into the rapidly disintegrating woods of the Starkiller Base to find the Master of the Knights of Ren would normally have been more careful, but the planet had been imploding at the time and everyone had felt a bit of a rush.

Ren had been conscious when they'd run across him collapsed on the edge of a precipice, but barely, his eyes unfocused and distant (and how irritated Ren would be to know so many had seen him without his mask, for all that it seemed the idiot had discarded it voluntarily). However, the Force user’s lethargy (and with it, what little peace remained to Hux after the shitshow that had been the last week of his life) was quickly cast aside after the cruiser's medic had finished cutting away his robes to get at his injuries and started making use of the cruiser's limited supply of bacta strips.

While there had been no protest—or even any sign of consciousness—while Lieutenant Lovare saw to the gaping hole in Ren's stomach and the burns on both of his shoulders, when the lieutenant's hand froze an inch above the gash bisecting Ren's face, Hux silently resigned himself to a difficult night.

Ren made what Hux had to admit was a valiant attempt to be intimidating as he growled to leave that particular injury alone, but it was undermined by the fact he crumpled back onto the gurney within his next breath. Still, it worked well enough on the lieutenant, whose hand Ren hadn't seen fit to unfreeze; she shot Hux a pleading look, to which Hux could only sigh and nod his permission to acquiesce to Ren's ridiculousness and flee the premises. After all, the cruiser had not originally been attached to the _Finalizer_ , and thus nowhere in the lieutenant's assigned duties was it listed that she had to deal with Kylo Ren. Well, it wasn’t technically listed in anyone’s duties, but at least people assigned to the _Finalizer_ knew what they were getting into. Lieutenant Lovare had been given no such warning.

So that left Hux alone with Ren, which was normally tolerable enough, but not when the one with Force powers was injured and both of them were in shock. That was what Hux had decided to call it. Eventually he might hit grieving. He didn't know what Ren would hit, but knowing him it would be a vital control panel while they were in the midst of hyperspace and all of them would rapidly accelerate into an asteroid.

It was depressing how not-unappealing that sounded. He hadn't slept in over two days. He hadn't eaten in twenty cycles. His life's work had exploded into a sun. He was almost certainly going to be blamed for it. Kylo Ren, who Hux was certain was actually to blame for it, at least in part, looked like he was about to keel over, which should have been satisfying, but wasn't. Most of this was due to the fact that Hux knew Supreme Leader Snoke would have him executed if he didn't deliver Ren to Snoke in perfect order, but part of it was the aforementioned shock. Sometimes you just reached a point where it was difficult to properly enjoy schadenfreude. Hux hadn't ever reached that point before, but then, he had never been this fucked before. Leader Snoke was probably going to execute him even if he arrived with Ren in the peak of health and just seething with dark emotions with which to smite the Resistance. Instead, Ren's already disturbing pallor was edging towards stormtrooper-white and he was tilting slowly towards his left side, and Hux's earlier idle thought about Ren collapsing at his feet in retrospect now seemed near-prophetic.

He caught Ren before the man tilted completely off the gurney, but it was a close thing. It wasn't helped by the fact that Ren shoved at him before Hux had completely hoisted him back up onto the cot, which was ineffectual at proving Ren didn't need his help but nearly managed to send both of them crashing to the deck.

The reality of it was that Hux's plan of lifting Ren into place abruptly shifted into 'Fuck it,' and it turned out to be fortunate in the end that Lieutenant Lovare had made her escape; he didn't think it would do much for morale—what little remained—for one of the junior officers to see a First Order general dropping its so-called greatest warrior onto the floor.

In Hux's defense, it was more of a controlled landing than that—while he didn't care that Ren had a categorical refusal on his file for all painkillers and sedatives, aggravating Ren's injuries beyond the point of being treatable by the bacta strips was not something he had any desire to chance—but it still ended with Kylo Ren leaning back against the gurney instead of on top of it, and then Ren was looking up at him instead of the other way around for once.

Except then the past forty-eight cycles finally decided to stop teasing him at the edges of his consciousness and slammed him behind the temples with a sledgehammer. He barely had the presence of mind to stagger to the medbay's only other gurney before sitting down, and then lying down started to sound like a good idea, and then-

"How did you find me?"

And now Kylo Ren was haunting his dreams with stupid questions, apparently. "The bond between our souls guided me towards your pulsating darkness of your pain."

"... No it didn't."

"No, it didn't," Hux agreed, and considered opening his eyes before deciding the conversation wasn't worth it. "I used the tracker in your belt."

The pause this time seemed less unsure. More like the crackle in the air that came before a lightning strike. Potential fires. Cleanup in Cruiser Delta's medbay: blood on floor and left gurney, one discarded bacta strip, and one First Order general, slightly burnt. "You put a tracker on me?"

"The First Order's clothing manufacturers put a tracker on you. As is standard for all First Order officers' belts to ensure one can easily be found in case of emergency while also ensuring placement for easy removal in case one's tracker becomes a hindrance. As I know you were messaged about at least once."

The air crackle dissipated with an almost embarrassed _snap_. "... Oh."

There had been about fifteen minutes between the destruction of Starkiller’s thermal oscillator’s conduit and the point when there was no longer a surface on the entire planet to stand on. Most of the engineers who had worked on completing the project had already been reassigned to other posts, but that had left well over one hundred thousand staff on base. They had run emergency evacuation drills, more because it was standard procedure than out of any belief they would ever need them. At the best numbers, it had taken twenty-three minutes to evacuate the entire base. Hux hadn’t received permission from Supreme Leader Snoke to grant the evacuation order until three minutes after Starkiller Base’s destruction had begun. That left twelve minutes. If the simulations had been accurate—as they likely weren’t, as within the simulations the ground hadn’t literally been falling beneath everyone’s feet—after twelve minutes, thirty-seven percent of the base would have successfully made it on board a shuttle or starfighter. Which meant, best-case scenario, over sixty thousand of his men were dead.

It was funny, how those numbers only occurred to him now. At least it was almost certain the _Finalizer_ was undamaged; based on the three squadrons sent by the Resistance, they didn’t have the firepower independent of the New Republic to take on anything like an _Insurgent_ -class Star Destroyer.


	4. Chapter 4

He had always known Ren choked subordinates who displeased him. Which—fine, whatever. Everyone and their mother knew Ren had a Darth Vader fetish, and having actually been in Ren’s personal quarters and seen the decayed remains of Vader’s helmet displayed on a pedestal, Hux could confirm there was something going on there that no one in their right mind would want to examine too closely. Half of the reason Hux put up with the ridiculous destruction of First Order property was that Ren had never actually killed any of said subordinates, and Hux had heard enough tales of Vader to be thankful Ren stopped short of emulating his idol in totality. Most of the subordinates had fucked up in some way anyway, and a little fear was always encouraging. It also had the hilarious side effect of making Hux seem warm and forgiving by comparison, which meant he also got to hear most of the best stories from his officers in the officers’ lounge about Ren’s various antics. So. Besides to the furniture and a variety of control panels, no real harm done. Some officers had a few interesting bruises to show off and tales to share of what it felt like to be hovering a few inches above a deck, but that was basically it.

Except that after returning from his training with Snoke, Ren got… unnerving. To Hux, specifically. Everyone else seemed to take the eerie calm as an improvement, but Hux had become used to the barely constrained vibrating. The best way to deal with a twitchy Ren was to make no sudden movements and always ensure any approach was within his direct line of sight. As long as one held to those guidelines, Ren was fairly predictable. Hux was accustomed to dealing with people whose faces he couldn’t see; Stormtroopers never removed their helmets except when off duty, after all. Therefore, he already knew how to watch for body language tells, and Ren had seemed to find himself opaque as long as he had on his helmet (which, ha).

Except… now he was. Hux couldn’t read him anymore, which was a worry when dealing with an unstable wizard who had just returned from a wizarding school class in how to be even angrier and less reasonable than before. The fact that no one else shared his concerns was an irritant, but this was one of those times Hux would have been happy to be proven wrong instead of finding himself standing over the corpse of Captain Hitrom a few weeks after Ren had made his way back to the _Finalizer_. Hitrom didn’t look to have died well, or quickly. No quick neck break here; her esophagus had been crushed, and Ren had abandoned her on the floor to suffocate. As usual during the report of a failure to Kylo Ren, everyone else had cleared out of the area to avoid both Ren’s initial bout of fury and getting in his way upon his exit, and (also usual) everyone had stayed out of the area for about fifteen minutes after Ren left to give Hitrom some time to get herself back in order. Except Hitrom had been dead for a few minutes by that point.

Hux had been informed of the goings on within thirty seconds of Lieutenant Orpix finding Hitrom’s cooling corpse on the floor, so it had been something less than half an hour since Hitrom’s demise that Hux arrived at the _Finalizer_ ’s morgue getting the cause of death explained to him by the attending mortician. It had taken Hux a few minutes to sort out his feelings, but in the end he decided that fury was a pretty accurate descriptor. Hitrom had been a good officer; it hadn’t even been her fuckup, really, just a catastrophic life support failure in a shuttle due to a mix up in maintenance assignments where all the occupants had been lucky to survive the emergency return to the shuttle bay. There had been no question of making it to Dantooine in time for the pickup of whatever personal effect Ren had wanted acquired.

Hux had expected to need to replace a door or something; he had not expected to need to replace the second-in-command of the _Finalizer’s_ premier commando unit. Who had made excellent cocktails. And had been engaged to the leader of Red Squadron. Fuck. She had almost certainly already heard, but Hux was going to have to tell her anyway. Because it was his co-commander who had murdered her fiancée.

Fuck his co-commander. Fucking Ren. Fucking _Ren_. Even if Hitrom had done something worth executing her over, there were fucking _protocols_ for this. Ren may have been outside the chain of command, but Hitrom wasn’t. She had deserved to be treated as an officer of the First Order, not like a common mercenary.

It took Hux some time to fully process exactly what had happened. Ren had just murdered an officer of the First Order. But the only person in a position to prosecute Ren for the crime was Snoke, who was also the only person Hux could think of who would likely be _happy_ that Ren had started murdering people on a whim. Hux couldn’t even kick Ren off the ship; it was Ren’s ship as much as his. But all the same, this was not a situation that could stand.


End file.
